NATURAL LAW AND WORLD ORDER IN STOICISM

Abstract

The thesis that there is a universal law working as a sort of supreme standard for morality has long been part of a strategy to ground the claim of objectivity. If it were possible to prove that there is a universal law including in itself the wholeness of the partial or positive laws, such a universal law being an ‘objective expression’ of what is correct without qualification, the particular laws would be correct always and in any event if and only if they were instantiations of such a universal law. Some contemporary theorists, however, argue that there is a strong contrast between ‘natural law’ (which in Ancient sources is said to be ‘the law of nature’ or even a ‘divine law’) and ‘human law’ (or ‘civic law’), and that natural law considered as a moral theory (the idea enjoying the longer pedigree) has nothing to do with legal theory, which is focused on legal positivism, a view claiming that no necessary connection exists between law and morality.1 By contrast, the ancient proponents of the natural law (specifically the Stoic philosophers) tend to remove the gap pointed out by the current theorists between natural law, on the one hand, and human or civic law, on the other hand. As a matter of fact, the linkage between natural and human law gives rise to the macro-microcosmos distinction, a viewpoint dear to the Stoics since the very beginning of the school.2 Some scholars have suggested reasonably that this approach goes back to Xenophon, a writer who seems to have had a significant impact upon the Stoics on this point.3 In the Memorabilia 4.4, 19-20 Xenophon’s argument runs thus: (i) the unwritten laws are those held as law in the same way in every land (ejn pavsh/ … cwvra/ kata; taujtav); (ii) but if there is such kind of laws, the question is who set those laws down; (iii) human beings cannot be responsible for having set them down, since they are not able to assemble all of such laws, nor do they speak the same language (ou[te sunelqei'n a{pante~ …ou[te oJmovfwnoi). (iv) Now if human beings have not set down the unwritten laws, one might think Natural Law and World Order in Stoicism 185 that gods have set down such laws for human beings. (v) And this is so because among all human beings (para; pa'sin ajnqrwvpoi~) the first ac-tion to be considered as law (prw'ton nomivzetai) is to revere gods. Xenophon also counts as an unwritten law honoring one’s parents, that parents have no intercourse with their sons, nor sons with their parents. At this point, Hippias (the interlocutor of Socrates in this section of the dialogue) objects to Socrates that this last unwritten law (i.e. that parents and sons have no intercourse with each other) cannot be a god’s law since some people transgress it (one also could put in doubt the admissi-bility of [v], inasmuch as not every human being believes in God). Socrates’ response is that people transgress many other laws, but this does not mean that such laws do not exist. Xenophon’s passage indeed has a Stoic flavor but even though it may have inspired some Stoic view regarding the scope of natural law, intercourse between parents and chil-dren was not regarded by the Stoics as an act contrary to nature and thereby contrary to god’s law.4 In addition, it should be noted here that in Xenophon’s argument nature does not play any role.